


And the painted ponies go

by Zofiecfield



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Feelings, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:07:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28794390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zofiecfield/pseuds/Zofiecfield
Summary: A first waltz in the kitchen, late at night.  And then, a second.
Relationships: Dani Clayton & Jamie, Dani Clayton/Jamie, Hannah Grose & Owen Sharma
Comments: 37
Kudos: 109





	And the painted ponies go

**Author's Note:**

> title from Joni Mitchell's _The Circle Game_.

The first came, unexpected, on an ordinary evening.

Hannah had been having trouble with the taps in the upstairs bathrooms all day, running too hot and then freezing cold, the pressure nearly gone to nothing, little poltergeists in the pipes. 

Jamie had agreed to take a look before leaving for the day, and in good spirits (and having shared a ride in that morning), Owen stuck around as well.

By the time the kids were in bed and the water pipes had been tamed well enough, it was quite late, inching in towards midnight. 

Owen and Jamie ought to have been on their way, and Hannah and Dani, straight to bed. 

But Owen was in the middle of a meandering story, his hands flying to animate the whispered tale, with Hannah laughing warmly by his side, her fingers light on his forearm as they walked. 

And Jamie, who had been promised a snack for her extra efforts, was shepherding them down the stairs towards the kitchen, with mutterings of tea and cheese on toast. 

Jamie turned, halfway down the staircase, and caught Dani’s eye.

“Coming?”

Dani, still at the top, had been thinking warm thoughts of bed and had already decided just to slip away to her room. 

But, suddenly much less sleepy under Jamie’s gaze, suddenly feeling plenty warm already, Dani changed her mind. 

She nodded and followed down the stairs. 

In the kitchen, Owen set the kettle to boil and sliced the bread leftover from lunch under Jamie’s supervision and demand. 

When he tried to hand her a plain slice of bread, she refused it in mock offense. 

Playing to Hannah and Dani’s laughter, Jamie pointed out the greased patches of her overalls and palms repeatedly, as evidence of her deserving work, until Owen finally relented and dug through the refrigerator for butter and cheese and jam.

After they had eaten, the conversation settled into a gentle lull of the clink of cups on saucers. 

Owen, his eyes slipping to Hannah, as they often did, rose from his chair. He put a cassette in the player by the window, and soon, a quiet instrumental piece of strings and keys filled the space.

Hannah smiled softly at his choice, closing her eyes to better savor it. 

“I haven’t listened to this in so long,” she said, wistful, her face taking on the faraway look that was becoming so familiar. “It’s good to hear it again.” 

Jamie met Owen’s eyes as he settled himself at the table, both smiling in a way Dani didn’t quite understand. 

Jamie ducked down and unlaced her boots, slipping them off and leaving them under the table, side by side. 

She nudged Hannah lightly. “Hannah? Shall we?”

Hannah’s eyes drifted open. She took Jamie in, the patched wool socks and the hint of mischief in her eye, and chuckled softly.

“Oh, Jamie, no,” she said. But her face was all pleasure and bright, and she was already standing, already accepting Jamie’s hand. 

“Maybe just one,” she whispered, as she took Jamie up in her arms. 

Jamie winked at her, drawing another smile to Hannah’s lips.

Dani watched the exchange, mystified. But her confusion tripped quickly into delight as Jamie and Hannah began to waltz along the tile. 

Hannah led, all elegance and grace, and Jamie followed.

Owen sat down beside Dani. Dani turned to him, a dozen questions on her lips, though her eyes often ticked back to the pair circumnavigating the kitchen island.

“We got snowed in for a weekend, winter after last,” Owen explained. “Late one night, after the power had gone out and the fire was settled, Hannah taught us to dance. She’s lived a life, that one.” 

He said the last bit with such fondness, Dani felt as though she ought to look away, to give him a moment alone with his thoughts. 

Hannah and Jamie spun in broad circles around the kitchen, laughing and whispering as their feet shook off two years of rust. 

They were mesmerizing to watch, and Dani found herself leaning forwards, the tap of her foot catching the beat of the music.

As the piece came to an end, Hannah asked something inaudible of Jamie, who grinned in answer. In one smooth motion, Hannah lowered Jamie into a slow, deep dip. 

The unexpected elegance of the pair – Jamie, in her stocking feet and overalls, a smear of grease on one cheek, and Hannah, serene and pleased and looking no older than seventeen – had Dani clapping madly, while Owen whooped his praise.

Once righted, Jamie pecked Hannah on the cheek and leaned in to whisper something in her ear, drawing a soft smile from Hannah. 

“Owen?” Jamie said, catching his eye and nodding towards the makeshift dancefloor. “Let’s see it.”

“Well now, after you two have gone and shown off,” he said, rising from his chair gamely and brushing off his hands emphatically, “I’ll have to bring my best moves. Get ready, Hannah, love.”

Hannah chuckled as she took the hand he offered, as she allowed him to tuck her into his arms. 

The next track started, a slow and steady piece.

They were lovely to watch – Hannah and all her grace, Owen and his many left feet. By the third measure, the two of them seemed to have melted into one another entirely, gaze held between them, the rest of the room, having fallen away. 

Dani caught herself in a bit of a sigh, the sweetness of this little family, almost too much to bear. 

And then, there was a hand, extended in front of her. A nudge against her side.

Jamie, standing beside her, waiting. “Come on, then.”

“Oh,” Dani breathed, shaking her head, her heart tripping in its rhythm a bit. “I don’t dance.”

“There’s no one here to see you, and you can’t be any worse than that one,” Jamie responded, nodding off towards Owen. “Up you get.”

Dani could have said no, she knew that plenty well, and Jamie would have sat down beside her and poured another cup of tea, just fine.

But Dani did not want to say no. Not even a little. Not when Jamie had that look in her eye, some sort of hesitant hope that felt entirely familiar.

She did not want the moment to pass. So, she rose and let Jamie take her hand.

Dani had danced before, many times, in fact. School dances and, later, classes for the wedding, all of which she had approached with a dread she could not look at too closely, for risk of nausea.

Bound in Eddie’s arms, low on her back and a bit too tight, as though he was already guarding against the loss of her. The awkward sway, her mind racing anywhere else, anywhere but there. The laborious 1-2-3s as Eddie counted the steps with mounting hurry, the music racing on without them.

If that were dancing, then this, here with Jamie, would need a new name. The same term could not possibly apply.

Jamie laced an arm around Dani, palm steady and high, spread between Dani’s shoulder blades. Just enough pressure to lean into a bit, just enough to give some weight, just enough to take some. 

While Dani was busy marveling in this first hand, the palm burning into her skin in the most pleasant of ways, Jamie had caught her other, fingers linked loosely together, hung gently at their sides. 

“Put your hand on me, like I’ve done here,” Jamie said quietly, moving her palm just enough to bring Dani’s attention flying back to it. Dani mirrored the position, the sharp ridges of Jamie’s spine alive and present beneath her.

“Good,” Jamie said softly, offering a counterbalance through their splayed palms, weight to weight, shared just enough to connect them. “Off we go.”

And then they were dancing.

Jamie swayed first, gentle with the music, carrying Dani along with her until Dani’s frame picked up the rhythm for itself, until Dani’s frame forgot itself entirely. 

Then, low in Dani’s ear, Jamie began to count. 

It was not the insistent metronome Dani had learned by. 

Instead, it seemed as if Jamie had touched upon some beat, buried deep in Dani, and lifted it to the surface. Some frequency she had, perhaps, always known and never quite managed to touch. 

Heart against ribs, blood through veins, nerves and their brilliant sparks, all singing a chorus of one, two, three.

Jamie’s feet began to move, and secure in Jamie’s arms, Dani’s feet did as well. The steps came naturally. The slow circle, an easy thing. 

As they revolved in the steady sway, Jamie’s soft breath on Dani’s neck, matching her own, Dani began to lose track of where she ended and where Jamie began. She lost all sense of the space between them, and forgot, for a moment, that she had not been here before, had not spent all her days in these arms.

Only when she felt Jamie shiver, just the slightest, did Dani realize her palm had migrated. It had, of its own accord, ventured up, spine and neck and curls, to cradle the base of Jamie’s skull. The thumb, feeling particularly moved, had begun to drift along, just below the hairline, keeping time.

Dani waited for the jump, the impending fall that would shatter this moment with her own gasp and the bright flash of headlights.

But the jump did not come, nor did the fall. For this single moment in time, safe in Jamie’s arms, the world and its many ghosts could not reach her.

Jamie’s thumb began to move as well, in time with her own, smoothing back and forth in its small arc over ribs and spine.

Dani thought, in some distant, disjointed way, that she might like to press her lips to the soft bit behind Jamie’s ear. She might like to trail her fingertips along the hairline there and down the column of Jamie’s neck, to find then notch of her sternum, to see if her fingertip would fit there as neatly as her heart claimed. 

She might, she thought, as the piece ended, as their bodies eased to a halt, as she felt the question rise in Jamie’s limbs, like to do this always, this soft sway in Jamie’s arms. 

Bolder than she had felt three minutes ago, her heart still beating out time in her chest, she did not drop her arms.

Instead, she turned her head and met Jamie’s eyes. 

“One more?” Dani asked.

In answer, Jamie stepped in a little closer, resting her cheek lightly against Dani’s. Dani could feel the grin there, against the skin, a perfect match of the one blooming across her own lips. 

And the next track began.

That was the first. 

Jamie had her own memories of the evening, but she asked Dani to tell her the story so many times over the years, that eventually, Dani’s memories became Jamie’s memories. 

It was Dani’s telling of the night, of that first dance, that Jamie tucked up inside herself and kept, a steady beat to carry her on.

There were many more after, scattered across the years. Nights on the kitchen dance floor, safe and secure in each other’s arms under the soft and steady sway.

But that was the first.

And this, as far as Jamie could ever recall, was the last.

It came, unexpected in the way endings tend to be. Even those that are, entirely, expected.

The memory of this one was her own.

Jamie lifted Dani to her feet beside the bathtub, under the arms like a child.

Their knees were damp, their socks, sodden, and Dani trembled, her whole body, as though it had come unstuck in the wind. 

Jamie pulled Dani close and tried desperately not to think of how her clammy skin smelled like pond water, murky and thick. Couldn’t possibly be true, not yet, but Jamie couldn’t shake the thought.

In her way, as she always did on the worst of days, Jamie did what needed doing.

She took off Dani’s clothes and tossed them onto the tile. 

The puddles there were diminishing as the water seeped down the hallway, into the woodwork, into the heart of the house. But the water would have to wait. 

She peeled off each layer, one by one, until Dani stood bare.

Dani did not move as she did so. Barely breathed. Just eyes, skittering back to the tub again and again.

With a whisper against Dani’s temple, Jamie left her there, stark and shivering. She returned only moments later with two sweaters and the pair faded flannel pants they’d bough a decade ago during their first winter. 

With steady hands, she dressed Dani’s frame, fighting and tugging cloth against the drag of damp skin.

Jamie stood then, rivulets of water dripping down her shins from the soaked knees of her jeans, and regarded Dani. 

She tried her best to keep her face calm, to quiet the furrow of brow, without much success. 

It didn’t matter much, anyway. Dani’s eyes were still elsewhere, still ticking from puddle to tub to puddle again, still half a world away at the bottom of a lake.

Hands firm on shoulders, Jamie steered Dani to the kitchen and leaned her against the counter there.

She set about making tea, soaking the damp from the ends of the Dani’s hair with the towel from the oven door until the kettle whistled.

Jamie pressed her lips to Dani’s forehead and a steaming mug into Dani’s hands, loathe to leave her like this, even for a moment more. 

But the house called, and she would not have the damp settling into the frame of it, no more than it already had. She would hold it off in every way.

Pushing Dani gently down into a chair and wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, to keep out the cold or to keep in the warmth, whatever was left of it, Jamie left the kitchen.

She mopped the hallway on her hands and knees with all of towels and rags she could find, the bedsheets taken from the mattress, the linen closet now bare. She soaked up as much of the water as she could and threw the armfuls of sodden fabric into the tub as it drained. 

She stood back and surveyed her work.

There was water still, plenty of it. Slick floors and the smell of moss and damp in the air. 

She took off her socks and tossed them onto the pile.

But she had done her best, and that would have to do for now.

The tea had grown cold in Dani’s hands by the time she had returned, too quickly for the short time away. 

Dani had not stop shivering. Two feet still sunk down in cold lake, the water rising higher. The world, muted by the depths.

Jamie would not have this. Not yet.

She tugged Dani up and against her. 

Dani did not assist and did not hinder, just moved, like a body in water, subject only to tides.

Jamie pulled her close, wrapping one arm around her. A palm, planted firmly along Dani's spine, bracing ribs against clammy skin. 

The other hand traced its way down, shoulder to elbow, elbow to wrist, to catch fingers at their sides.

Jamie began a soft sway.

There was no weight left to Dani now, no heft to be carried. No counterbalance between palms, the scales long since shattered.

And still, Jamie held tight, an anchor. 

Her thumb, soothing a steady beat against Dani’s skin.

Slowly, so slowly it might have been a dream, Dani’s free hand begin to drift.

Wrist to elbow, across the back, notching into place between Jamie’s shoulder blades.

The slight pressure of it there, the cool palm warming slowly against cotton, was everything, was entirely enough.

Jamie’s breath caught in her chest and her heart faltered, but she still she swayed, steadying and sure.

As the minutes ticked by, Dani’s palm, featherlight along skin, drifted further. 

Spine and neck and curls to find, at last, its home at the base of Jamie’s neck. Thumb, etching gentle circles into skin.

Jamie pressed her lips to the soft skin behind Dani’s ear, and began to hum a tune, pulled from some distant place, from a kitchen, years ago.


End file.
